208 PART THREE • iNsTiTuTioNs oF AMERiCAN govERNMENT
Redistricting after the 2012 Census. As we have observed repeatedly, 2010 was a very
good year for the Republican Party—and 2010 was also a census year. Republicans, there-
fore, controlled an unusually large number of the state legislatures responsible for redis-
tricting. As you might expect, gerrymandering in 2012 favored the Republicans. Consider
Pennsylvania. In 2012, Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives in that
state received a total of 2.72 million votes. Republican candidates did slightly less well with
2.65 million votes. With these votes, Pennsylvania elected five Democrats and thirteen
Republicans. True, some states, such as Illinois, were gerrymandered for the Democrats.
Nationally, however, the Republicans retained control of the U.S. House after the 2012
elections, even though they received fewer votes overall than the Democrats. Such a result
is unusual.“Minority-Majority” districts
Under the mandate of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Justice Department issued direc-
tives to states after the 1990 census instructing them to create congressional districts that
would maximize the voting power of minority groups—that is, create districts in which
minority group voters were the majority. The result was a number of creatively drawn
congressional districts—see, for example, the depiction of Illinois’s Fourth Congressional
District in Figure 9–3 on the facing page, which is commonly described as “a pair of
earmuffs.”
Many of these “minority-majority” districts were challenged in court by citi-
zens who claimed that creating districts based on race or ethnicity alone violates the
equal protection clause of the Constitution. In 2001, for example, the Supreme Court
reviewed, for a second time, a case involving North Carolina’s Twelfth District. The
district was 165 miles long, following Interstate 85 for the most part. According to a
local joke, the district was so narrow that a car traveling down the interstate highway
with both doors open would kill most of the voters in the district. In 1996, the Supreme
Court had held that the district was unconstitutional because race had been the domi-
nant factor in drawing the district’s boundaries. Shortly thereafter, the boundaries were
redrawn, but the district was again challenged as a racial gerry mander. In 2001, how-
ever, the Supreme Court held that there was insufficient evidence that race had been
the dominant factor when the boundaries were redrawn.^7 The Twelfth District’s bound-
aries remained in place.x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x xo o o o
o o o o
o o o o
o o o oo o o o
o o o o
o o o o
o o o oExample 1. A bipartisan gerrymander,
aimed at protecting incumbents in both the
O Party and the X Party.x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x xo o o o
o o o o
o o o o
o o o oo o o o
o o o o
o o o o
o o o oExample 2. An unstable system. All districts
have the same number of supporters in
each party.x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x xo o o o
o o o o
o o o o
o o o oo o o o
o o o o
o o o o
o o o oExample 3. A classic partisan gerrymander.
The X Party is almost guaranteed to carry
three districts.FiguRE 9–2: Examples of districting
- Easley v. Cromartie, 532 U.S. 234 (2001).
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